Street Roots helps Alien Boy

Alien Boy has been selected by Street Roots newspaper for it’s June 2008 ACT NOW! advocacy page.

On the back of every issue, ACT NOW! gets the readers of Street Roots excited about taking direct action to make change.

We have asked friends of Alien Boy to host small fundraising parties at their home or office and invite their friends and family members to support Alien Boy and get an update about our project.

We’ve done great with our fundraising to date. Over the summer we hope to hold at least ten parties to bring more support from individuals to the film. Planning is beginning for a benefit in the Fall at the Wonder Ballroom.

Street Roots is a nonprofit, grassroots newspaper that assists people experiencing homelessness and poverty by creating flexible income opportunities. Through education, advocacy and personal expression, they are a catalyst for individual and social change. The production of Alien Boy was Street Root’s cover story in May.

Street Roots is sold by vendors at dozens of locations all over town.

Meet The Filmmakers: John Bischof

“Ultimately, I think it’s stigma that killed him,” says John Bischof—former medical director of Oregon’s state’s largest medical health provider, Cascadia, who is now working on Alien Boy as a technical advisor specializing in mental illness. “I think this state in particular, on the mental health and addictions side, should be leading and funding an ongoing anti-stigma campaign. That’s the problem here, it’s still an embarrassment in Oregon to have a mental illness, despite the fact that the police bureau has had a crisis intervention team since 1996. And that’s a failure of state policy.”

Bischof, who is frustrated, clearly, by the stigmatization of people like Chasse, feels America is constantly remaking its people with mental illness into “one-dimensional boogeymen.” Until the film A Beautiful Mind, Bischof can’t think of a year when a film wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award that didn’t portray a character with mental illness as either maniacal or cannibalistic.

“And these images permeate our culture,” he says. “And they say, it doesn’t really matter if we kill you, because you’re a threat.”

Is that what happened to Chasse? Were the police threatened by him?

“It appears to me that his death was another example of the police responding to their perception of, and stigmatization of, a mentally ill person,” Bischof continues. “It was my understanding that Mr.Chasse, even from pictures that I’ve seen, was obviously mentally ill.”

Bischof has been trying to focus on what Chasse’s last moments might have been like, through the lens of his illness.

“It must have been terrifying. It would be terrifying for anyone, but for people with schizophrenia, it’s a perceptual disorder. There are problems with perceiving and assembling, and assimilating a reality,” he says. “People with schizophrenia who are in recovery may be able to suddenly realize that they can’t always trust their perception of reality, which is terrifying. So when [the police officers]yelled out at him, he may not have trusted his perception of that. If I were a person with mental illness, I’d run.“

Bischof began working at the Garlington Center in Portland on NE Martin Luther King Blvd and Alberta in 1993, while finishing his studies in public psychiatry at OHSU, and remained there for five years.

“I wanted to be a little old community mental health psychiatrist for the next 30 years,” he says. “Then merged Medicaid happened, and the Garlington Center was the first casualty of bad systems management, and I was distressed to stand by and watch the place I loved working be destroyed.”

Bischof did a fellowship in public psychiatry at the University of Columbia, and returned to Portland in 2001, just as Peter Davidson was starting Cascadia. Bischof became medical director of Cascadia in 2001, and left in August 2006, just a month before Chasse’s death. Bischof feels Cascadia was doing things right for James Chasse—that he was, in many ways, a success of the mental health system.

“He was in services. It’s not like he wasn’t working on his life,” he says. “And maybe he looks obviously mentally ill, but that’s not a crime, and it’s something we do, in fact, work on, with patients. We call it activities for daily living. I want to help people understand the psychiatric, psychological and sociological aspects of the illness that he suffered from. And this intimate experience that he might have had, this terrifying experience, because that’s what, I think, will really make this story live.”

How You Can Help Alien Boy

Making movies takes money. Though we’ve been blessed with generous donors and gifts of time and equipment, and we’re tight on a shoestring budget, Alien Boy has expenses which must be paid.

You can help by hosting a fund raising event for Alien Boy at your home or office.

This event will include a screening of parts of Alien Boy and director Brian Lindstrom’s film Finding Normal. Also Brian will give a talk about the progress of the documentary.

Your donation, through an event or individually by mail, is welcome. Alien Boy is sponsored by the Mental Health Association of Portland, a nonprofit organization. Your donation is tax deductible. Send your contribution to Mental Health Association of Portland, PO Box 3641, Portland, Oregon 97208.

Return to this site for regular updates and information about upcoming events you can attend.

Call Jason at 503-367-6128 or email info@mentalhealthportand.org to host an event for Alien Boy.

Meet The Filmmakers: John Campbell

John Campbell is eating calamari in one of Portland’s Pearl District restaurants, three blocks North of where James Chasse was accosted by police in September 2006. This is a neighborhood Campbell knows well, but one he has seen change enormously over the years since he first came to the city from Berkeley, California, in 1974.

“I shot Mala Noche [with director Gus Van Sant] right here in this neighborhood,” he says. “When we needed an extra we’d go and grab one off the street, pay them $10. It was that easy. There aren’t many people like that around now.”

“This part of town was Portland’s skid road,” he continues. “There were lots and lots of hardcore alcoholics, street people and migrant workers. Also, lots of gypsies. It was the backdrop, it lent a setting to those films about people living very close to the street. You can always find those worlds, maybe not in this neighborhood any more, but cities evolve.”

Campbell, who is the director of photography for Alien Boy, has just finished shooting 19 interviews over a week, and he’s excited about the project.

“I was really knocked out,” he says. “It was extraordinary on all different levels. When you think of the punk movement, you think of something fresh, wild, angry, beautiful, raw, and brilliant. You don’t necessarily think of middle-aged people being misty and looking back at the good old days. Somehow the punk movement stays alive in a really raw way, and now to be taking a look at it in almost a nostalgic way, it’s odd for me. I’m having to adjust my time reference.”

“The eyewitnesses were very impressive because of how shocked they were by the event,” he continues. “That’s not to say anything but for the first time in their lives, they were witnessing the aftermath of violence, which is possible. Nevertheless they were blown away but not only that, they seemed to really want the truth to be told, as they saw it. And that makes you perk up.”

It’s important to Campbell to be as objective as possible while making the film. Drawing inspiration from a documentary canon that includes such filmmakers as Ricky Leecock, D.A Pennebaker, and The Maysels Brothers, he says he “loves the principles of documentary.”

“The life of the average person is fascinating,” he says. “Every life is incredible. In every life, all the elements of great literature are there, you just have to scrape the surface. And beyond that, there are extraordinary lives. If you can bring a camera into that, and develop a trusting relationship with your subject, and come away with that story, it’s usually pretty doggone amazing.”

“When Brian and I talked about how to visualize this film, we agreed to approach it very open-minded,” he continues. “I thought it was very unfortunate when the city attorneys assumed we were going to be adversarial, because that’s the opposite of what we were going to try to do. If you go in assuming the police are a bunch of murderers, you’re going to miss a lot. So I’d love it if they would give us a chance.”

Although Campbell admits that documentary is “kind of a wide open world,” now. There was a time when purists might call bullshit on your film for not adhering to certain principles, but no longer. And in the spirit of experimentation, Campbell has been working on several devices with Lindstrom to make the film come alive for the viewer. “Nobody wants a documentary to switch between talking heads and b-roll,” he laughs. These include using Super 8 to visualize Chasse’s experience, and an old 35mm Arriflex camera converted into a hand-crank device.

Asked about what questions the film raises in his mind, Campbell cites an interview he heard with American radio broadcaster Studs Terkel, towards the end of his life.

“He said, ‘you know, something has changed in this country’,” Campbell says. “And you can see it, just in the speech. Our speech has gotten so mean, things like ‘I’m gonna take him out,’ all the violence that’s gotten absorbed into our speech. And I agree with Terkel, that there’s a meanness that’s been absorbed into American culture. And I want to believe that only as a worst case scenario, is what happened to James Chasse the result of quotidian violence, that it wasn’t the result of people whose meanness was practiced day in and day out, every day. But I’m worried. Because of a shift to a slightly meaner tone in this country.”